Westworld Season 2 Premiere Review: "Journey Into Night"

This review contains spoilers for the Westworld Season 2 premiere, titled "Journey Into Night."

It’s been more than a year since Westworld left our screens, and while you’d be forgiven for forgetting all the twists, turns and secret identities revealed in the first season (Bernard = Arnold; Dolores = Wyatt; Man in Black = William; Teddy = confused) the show does appear to be a little more willing to reveal its hand in the Season 2 premiere, albeit while still falling into some of the same traps it set for itself in Season 1.

Unlike last season’s dual timeline twist, the premiere establishes up front that we’re working in several time periods: The night of the host uprising and the day after; some point approximately two weeks later, when Delos company man Karl Strand and his security team find Bernard on the beach with no memory of what he’s been up to since that night; and flashbacks to a nebulous period before that, when Arnold (or Bernard? Bernarnold?) was still having his philosophical debates with a non-sentient Dolores.

This opening conversation between Arnold and Dolores foreshadows the reveal later in the episode that Bernard believes that he’s somehow killed all of the other hosts (including poor doomed Teddy, the only host the camera lingers on), after Strand’s team discovers them floating lifeless in a new ocean that doesn’t appear on the park’s map.

Westworld: The Missing Characters Back for Season 2 and More

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Click through for a primer on all the major characters in Westworld's second season, including several who you might've thought were missing and gone for good! Spoilers follow for Season 1...

01 OF 22

Click through for a primer on all the major characters in Westworld's second season, including several who you might've thought were missing and gone for good! Spoilers follow for Season 1...

Westworld: The Missing Characters Back for Season 2 and More

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In the opening scene, Arnold tells Dolores, “I dreamt I was on an ocean, with you and the others on the distant shore… You’d left me behind, and the waters were rising around me.” Dolores asks him what the dream means, and he tells her it doesn’t mean anything because dreams aren’t real. Dolores then asks him perhaps the central question of the series: “What is real?” Arnold’s answer is “That which is irreplaceable,” which doesn’t satisfy Dolores since, she points out, “It’s not completely honest.”

This is the same discussion Maeve has with Lee Sizemore later in the episode, after he insists she’s not real, and she points out that her unreal hands could still very easily kill him if she so desired. Reality is subjective, and that’s a lesson that Westworld will no doubt continue to hammer home until the humans that inhabit this world have thoroughly learned it, even if viewers at home have already wised up.

Water is a recurring theme in the first episode – even in the opening credits, the desert imagery of Season 1 has largely been replaced with shots of the new ocean, interspersed with images of a cowboy hat sinking, hinting that the mystery of Teddy’s apparent demise will likely play a large part in the season moving forward.

The episode does an admirable job of resetting the status quo for all of our characters in the “past” portion of the timeline; Maeve, Lee, and Hector are on the hunt for Maeve’s daughter, and they make a delightfully snarky threesome; Dolores, Teddy, and Angela (who was apparently wasted as a park greeter all those years, since she’s apparently secretly an expert marksman) are visiting bloody revenge on the guests that tormented them for years – although Teddy seems a little disturbed by Dolores’ newfound bloodlust; Bernard and the enigmatic Charlotte Hale are skulking around hidden parts of the park in an attempt to request a rescue (but whoever Charlotte’s working with on the mainland is refusing to play ball until they receive the “package” of information that was hidden in Peter Abernathy last season); and the Man in Black is once again wandering around the park on his latest quest – to find “the door.”

Unlike “The Maze,” Robert Ford’s final game was apparently designed just for William, and Ford is apparently still eager to toy with his old rival from beyond the grave, using the host version of his younger self to deliver cryptic messages that seem designed to frustrate his foe.

Exit Theatre Mode

It’s this particular story thread that feels like too much of a retread of Season 1 and all of the show’s worst impulses. While the reveal that Jimmi Simpson and Ed Harris were playing the same character was a satisfying one (albeit one that came too late in the season for fans who had figured it out early on), the Man in Black’s search for the maze often felt repetitive, gratuitously violent, and not particularly compelling.

While it’s understandable that showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy might want to make up for the fact that the maze pretty much had no bearing on William’s overall story arc last season, I’m not particularly enthusiastic about the thought of spending another season watching Ed Harris squint and grunt and shoot his way through a different (but seemingly very similar) mission. As badass as Harris looks with that black hat on, why should we care about his fixation with “winning” a game that has been rendered obsolete by the hosts’ newfound freedom?

More interesting is the notion that even if the hosts have technically broken out of their narratives, remnants of their programming still remain, especially in the way they speak; one of the best exchanges of the episode comes when Maeve threatens to rip off Lee’s most beloved organ and feed it to him, and he notes that he wrote that line for her. “Bit broad, if you ask me,” she retorts. Aside from being a killer zinger, it does raise the question of exactly how much free will the hosts actually have – like an AI version of the nature versus nurture debate.

Fans who dug into all the clues that the show was dropping via the Discover Westworld and Delos Destinations sites during Season 1 may have already picked up on this, but the Season 2 premiere confirmed the theory that Delos has also been harvesting guests’ DNA when they visit the park (and you thought Facebook’s privacy was iffy!) for an as-yet unrevealed reason. Whether they’re working to clone guests or try to transfer their consciousness somehow, it’s safe to assume that nothing good can come of it, especially if Bernard was unaware of it all this time.

Poor Bernard is having a pretty rough time of it in the premiere in general – he’s seemingly suffering some understandable side effects from being shot in the head last season, including time-slippage, cognitive dissonance, loss of motor function and plenty of other scary sounding malfunctions that make it sound like he’s on the verge of total system failure, which will make it increasingly hard for him to hide his secret identity as a host from the likes of Hale and Strand. Dolores was our unreliable narrator last season, and it’s clear that Bernard is taking over that role this year, so it’s hard to trust anything he seems to be remembering. The fact that we hear him ask “is this now?” in the opening minutes should be a good indicator that we can’t take anything he says at face value, and that probably includes his admission to Strand that he somehow killed the other hosts. To dig deeper into my theory on what this week’s cliffhanger could mean for both Bernard and the seemingly dead Teddy, check out our Westworld Diagnostics video at the top of the page.

A couple of other stray observations from the Season 2 premiere:

Stubbs lives! The promotional materials kind of gave that away already, but it’ll be interesting to see how the brawny head of security managed to escape after being ambushed by his Ghost Nation captors.

We hear Strand arguing with a couple of Asian men in military garb on the beach as Bernard is getting his bearings, with Strand curtly pointing out that he has an "executive statement executed by your country giving Delos authority over this island," confirming theories that the parks are separated from the mainland, and that they definitely don't seem to be based anywhere close to the US. Why could that be?

We know there are at least six parks, after Bernard and Strand’s crew come across a dead Bengal tiger on the shore, and apparently there are only Bengals in Park 6, although they’ve “never crossed park borders” before. Since it would be difficult for a tiger to make it through security doors, maybe the borders between the parks aren’t quite as restrictive as we’d assume – maybe they’re only separated by water? Since we know we’re visiting at least one other park this season thanks to the tease of Shogun World, maybe we’ll find out sooner rather than later.

The Verdict

Westworld's Season 2 premiere is an ambitious and intriguing return to the only vacation spot that's deadlier than Jurassic Park. While the show still relies a little too heavily on cryptic clues and portentous dialogue, it remains at its best when exploring the nature of humanity and the dangers of hubris.

Great

Not all of Westworld's new mysteries seem equally compelling, but there's still delight to be found amid the violence.